Wallace v. Ehrman: Can We Trust the Text of the New Testament?

A little trailer for the debate DVD now available for purchase at CSNTM.org:

Ed Komoszewski provides a detailed account of the debate, including a summary of Dr. Wallace’s central argument:

(1) The New Testament has vastly more manuscripts than any other ancient author. In fact, it has more than one thousand times as many copies as the average classical author does. An impressive argument was that if we treated the rest of classical literature the way Ehrman treats the New Testament, we would have to confess ignorance about almost everything from the ancient world. This, in quick turn, would usher us back into the dark ages.

(2) The New Testament has far more manuscripts in the early centuries than any other ancient author. It boasts more than 500 manuscripts within 800 years of its completion. Within 200 years of its completion, the New Testament has three times more manuscripts than the average classical author has in 2000 years! Wallace also noted that there are as many as a dozen New Testament manuscripts (all fragments) from the second century, and more than 60 through the third. Ehrman basically ignored these facts and played his single note: We don’t have the earliest copies, so how can be sure that we can get back to the text?

(3) There are two attitudes that rational people will avoid: absolute certainty and radical skepticism. When examining historical data, we simply can’t be as certain as scientists are when their experiments are repeatable, controlled, and predictable. History doesn’t yield itself to such certainty. But it also does not warrant the rampant skepticism that is found among many postmodernists today. Although Wallace never called Ehrman a radical skeptic, Ehrman ultimately wound up portraying himself as one. This was in spite of Ehrman’s acknowledgment that a good historian deals in probabilities—precisely as Wallace had been arguing.

(4) The New Testament copying was not like the telephone game. Though Ehrman never used this analogy, his representation of the copying process was sure reminiscent of it. Wallace gave five or six reasons why this approach is false. Among his points, he mentioned that researchers can go “up the line” to earlier witnesses to find out what they said, that there were multiple lines of transmission rather than a single line, that the copying was in written rather than oral form, and that there was no desire to botch the job (which is the whole point of the telephone game).

(5) The Alexandrian family had roots that almost surely went back to the first decades of the second century. Wallace demonstrated this with P75 and B, and quoted Ehrman to prove his point! Ehrman never disputed Wallace’s point, but still tried to claim that we “have no idea” what the earliest manuscripts had. That sure sounded like special pleading and simply ignoring any arguments that didn’t fit Ehrman’s theory.

(6) Wallace’s coup de grâce was his listing of various titles of books that Ehrman had written. Wallace argued that if Ehrman was right that we simply have no idea what the original text said, then all of Ehrman’s books on the New Testament would be pointless! Among them are Orthodox Corruption of Scripture; Misquoting Jesus; The New Testament: A Historical Introduction; The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration; and Forged. Wallace showed that in Forged Ehrman assumed that he knew what the words were in Paul’s authentic letters (which Ehrman identifies as seven of the thirteen letters traditionally attributed to Paul), to the degree that he could pronounce judgment on the words in the Pastoral letters. It was a brilliant stroke: Forged was published earlier this year, and it simply reveals that Ehrman is massively inconsistent on what he thinks the original New Testament said. In his response, Ehrman said something to the effect that “many of those books were written nearly twenty years ago, and I have changed my mind in the last few years.” Wallace responded that none of the books was twenty years old and that most of them had been written in the last five or six years. Indeed, Forged came out earlier this year. Wallace even hinted that 2000 years of New Testament scholarship would be flushed down the toilet if Ehrman’s new, inconsistently-held view of the text were to win the day.

@Pete & @Old Buzzard: We apologize that the Debate DVD Trailer didn’t have any soundbites. The production company that filmed the debate and the Center both worked diligently to get the DVD to the public as soon as possible–with the best possible quality of video and sound. Furthermore, a 55 second trailer is hardly sufficient time to represent both sides accurately with fair collegiality to both Dr. Ehrman and Dr. Wallace and their respective positions. Lastly, the sound and the video clips were not synched together in the RAW footage. This means that there was approximately 2 hours of RAW video data, across four different cameras and 7 different mics, that all needed to be synched together, which is a very difficult and time-consuming task. The quality of the work is seen in the DVD itself, which you can purchase at csntm.org, and so dispel your disappointments about the trailer.